Hue-istic and the wobble launcher

Hue-istic is an Android launcher that sorts your apps by colour. Its public site, hueistic.com, shows the drawer views (rainbow, mosaic, honeycomb, hue ring, bubbles), and it is in closed beta on Google Play. The site walks through the three steps to join the beta: join the tester group, opt in on Google Play, then install. Google requires twelve testers over fourteen days before a production launch.

The generic launcher

Under the colour sorting is a complete launcher: home screen, dock, folders, widgets with resizing, long-press actions and an app drawer. The generic-launcher branch extracts that into a "taste-free" base, built to be forked and personalized mostly by editing one file. How the drawer sorts and groups, the background, the per-app decorations, the badges and where usage data goes are each a small interface wired through a single Personality class. Hue-istic's colour features come back as a worked example (the color flavour) without touching the core code. It carries 796 tests and has been run on a real phone. Work on it is paused, and it isn't public yet.

Wobble: a launcher only one person asked for

The prompt was:

Update the "generic launcher" branch with all the fixes we had so far, and then off of that make a silly demonstration branch of the generic launcher that makes it so the app icons act like they are little buttons pinned at the top to the backing, so when you giggle the phone they wobble back and forth. Something clearly whimsy and silly to demonstrate a point about hyper personalized software

What came back is every app icon (home screen, dock, folder popup, drawer) drawn as a button pinned to the wallpaper by a red push-pin at its top edge.

• Tilt the phone and the icons hang toward the new "down".
• Jiggle it and they swing, then settle. The accelerometer reports the phone's acceleration minus gravity, so each icon feels the opposite. Gravity pulls it down, and jerking the phone left throws it right.
• Each app's swing (length and damping) comes from its package name, so the same app always wobbles the same way and neighbours don't swing in lockstep.
• The pin has a little friction, so on a phone lying flat the icons drift back upright instead of wandering.
• The frame loop only runs while something is moving, and the sensor is released whenever the launcher isn't visible.

Everything else in the launcher is untouched. In the branch's own words: "A launcher you rent ships what makes sense for a hundred million people, so a whim like this never makes the cut. A launcher you own, with an agent that can read it, takes a whim like this in an afternoon."